One day in 1953, the acclaimed sculptor Augusta Savage gave a gift to the Finger family, her white neighbors near the same Saugerties road that now bears her name. It was a bust she’d made of their six-year-old son, Wesley.
Wesley Finger, now 79, still has the bust. It’s a treasured reminder of a childhood across a pasture from the kind, elegant, and ferociously intelligent woman who bought a home in Saugerties in 1945 after spending most of the previous two decades in New York City. She moved from her apartment at 70 W. 120th St., a half-block from what is now Marcus Garvey Park.
The retired IBM chip designer and computer programmer, who lives in Saugerties, recalls how the sculpture project irked his dad, the family barber, when Savage decreed that Finger wasn’t to have a trim until she was finished.
“Don’t let your parents cut your hair until I’m done,” Savage told him, Finger recalled.
It’s one of many memories he has of Savage, who grew close to the family and gained their trust to the extent that they allowed their eldest daughter, sixteen-year-old Lois, to spend a weekend in the city with her at a party.
Savage’s years in Saugerties were far more than simply a retreat from New York. They form the closing chapter of a singular American life. She was a Harlem Renaissance sculptor and arts luminary who had known acclaim, racial exclusion, professional betrayal, illness and poverty, and who came to Ulster County to build something quieter but no less remarkable. To make ends meet, she raised chickens, worked as a laboratory assistant and seamstress – and kept making art.
Today, an upstate life that had once slipped from public memory, has been rediscovered. The road she lived on was renamed Augusta Savage Road in 1999. Her home, bought and renovated by Karlyn Knaust Elia, the daughter of her employer, and Elia’s partner, Richard Duncan, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001.
The Saugerties Historical Museum presented an exhibition of Savage’s Saugerties sculptures in 2018. Six years later, PBS presented a documentary, “Searching for Augusta Savage,” which included a tour of her renovated home by Anthony Elia.
That same year, the Orpheum Theatre in Saugerties held a tribute to Savage that played to a sold-out crowd. ShoutOut Saugerties is planning a second Augusta Savage tribute event at the Orpheum for the summer of 2026.
By the time Savage, ill with cancer, moved back to Harlem in 1960 to live with her daughter, she’d carved out a life as a homesteader who sold pigeons as squab in the city, fished in nearby Beaverkill Creek, and planted a large vegetable garden. She also kept producing sculptures—not just Wesley’s bust, but another one of a young woman, a commissioned piece for the author Poultney Bigelow and even a whimsical penguin that she made for another neighbor, Albert Masiero, that stood for years outside his restaurant in Lenox, Massachusetts.
In Saugerties, Savage found a measure of peace after a tumultuous career. She lived and worked in New York for more than two decades, except for two years, from 1929 to 1931, when she studied in Paris. That opportunity came as a kind of redress for the scholarship she won in 1923 to attend the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts, only to have it revoked on the eve of her departure because of her race.
A noted member of the Harlem Renaissance, she founded the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts and between 1936 and 1939 taught at the Harlem Community Art Center, where her students included Jacob Lawrence, described by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as the best-known African American artist of the 20th Century.
She was the only Black woman commissioned to create art for the 1939 World’s Fair. Her 16-foot-tall sculpture “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a harp composed of a choir supported by the arm of God, was among her best-known works. Yet it was bulldozed and destroyed when the fair closed because Savage couldn’t afford to have it cast in bronze or even moved.
Then, Gwendolyn Bennett, who had replaced Savage as director at the Harlem Art Center while she took time off to sculpt her work for the Fair, refused to resign. Savage then opened the Salon of Contemporary Negro Art, described by historian Tammi Lawson as the “the first Black-owned and operated commercial art gallery in America.”
For most of that time, as documented in Jill Lepore’s “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” she was being harassed by Gould, an indigent white man who turned hostile after she refused his marriage proposal. On top of that, Lepore wrote, colleagues pressured her to recruit for the Communist Party. In April and June of 1941, she told FBI agents investigating Bennett’s Communist ties that her former colleague expressed Communist views. Savage thought, correctly, that the reason Bennett didn’t relinquish her job was because Savage wasn’t a Communist, according to Lepore.
After the gallery closed in only three months for lack of sales, Savage embarked on a lecture tour, only to be struck by a near-fatal attack of Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever that was so serious that she had to relearn how to walk, according to an interview published by the Catskill Mountain Star in 1949 and reporting by Lepore. The article also noted that her home largely lacked the sculpture tools she’d had in her New York studio.
Savage settled In Saugerties, where she taught Sunday school at the Lutheran Church of the Atonement, gave talks on subjects including the Congo and Liberia, hosted Fresh Air Fund kids from the city and was often described by local newspapers, in the language of the time, as “the celebrated Negro sculptress” when she delivered regular speeches at churches and other organizations. In 1955, she placed an ad in the Saugerties Daily Post seeking work as a seamstress.
Savage couldn’t entirely escape racism. She lived in a home that, for years, lacked electricity or plumbing, on a road named for decades for the most hurtful term for African-Americans in the U.S. vocabulary. After the Finger family brought her to a church supper, they were told not to bring her again. As a result, Steenburn said, the Fingers “left that church and went to the big Methodist Church in Saugerties.”
Savage drew close to the wealthy Knaust family. She worked as a laboratory assistant for scientist Herman Karl Knaust Jr., testing mushroom extracts for a potential cure for cancer, an offshoot of the sprawling mushroom-growing and canning business started in a disused iron mine by his father, Herman Karl Knaust Sr. That business is now Iron Mountain Inc., valued by the stock market at $32 billion.
Savage and the Knausts shared a love for poetry and literature such as the Shakespeare sonnets she recited from memory. The younger Knaust once told his grandson Anthony Elia that she was one of the smartest people he knew.
She also kept sculpting, helped by Herman Knaust Jr., who brought her clay and tools, Elia said. In the early 1950s, the younger Knaust arranged a commission for her to sculpt a bust of Poultney Bigelow, the journalist and author known as “the sage of Malden,” who had befriended Kaiser Wilhelm II at prep school in Potsdam, Germany. That bust is privately owned today.
In addition, in 1953, the “well-known sculptress” presented suggestions for a memorial to the war dead, according to the Saugerties Daily Post. While a committee was appointed to meet her and make further plans, it appears the monument was never built.
Audrey Finger Steenburn, Wesley Finger’s sister, remembers posing for Savage as a child, serving as a body double for a sculpture of a young woman.
“It was my legs she wanted in a certain position to get them exactly right,” said Steenburn, 86, who lives in a Glenmont retirement home. “She told me that I had classic features and that I would grow old looking great. She was just the most loving, wonderful woman.”
Margaret Tomlinson is a contributing writer.
Alec D.B. McCabe is a contributing writer and editor.
You can send them an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.